I liked how this article Distracting Miss Daisy in The Atlantic meshed right into the stuff I’ve been reading lately. The writer says they do traffic control better in the UK, and it results in fewer deaths. But mainly, I was interested in the claim that having so many signs to warn drivers takes their eyes away from the road. I seem to remember thinking that way back when I drove regularly.
This item on Infowars, Secret Plan To Kill Internet By 2012 Leaked? had the interesting element of wondering whether a YouTube video was a hoax. And then, realizing that it didn’t matter anyway. Even if the video is only looking for attention (check out the cleavage on that interviewer! - not very professional), what they are talking about is very real. I encourage you to look further into “Network Neutrality”, because it’s on the slippery slope to a dystopian future of corporate slavery. Then again, there’s nothing in the constitution that says you can’t gradually rewrite the whole thing through the years to completely oppose the spirit of the original.
For a minute, I was thinking that this represented a naive idea about what an internet is, but I see the danger. The web could probably “go underground”, but that would only encourage the actual criminalization of the activity on it - the premise seems to be that governments want to lock down this aspect of free speech to stop terrorists. Even if it’s true, it’s still a red herring. The sort of content that draws most people to the Web is exactly the sort of content I could happily live without. For the most part, this content is already on a broadcast model. Social networking and video uploads are a threat to that model, so the people who derive power and money from broadcast would naturally want to block it - or as they do now, leave it as an incubator and steal all the good ideas. These types are understandably uncomfortable with individuals expressing their own opinions. It messes up the status quo. I guess if I were rich and powerful, I would get pretty excited about the ‘status quo’, too.
The Infowar site itself is a bit lurid. I enjoy the irony that fringe ideas require flashy animated banner ads - as if plain text wasn’t exciting enough. It’s that very mode of attention-grabbing that undermines sober analysis of issues. We get what we deserve - two sides shouting over each other to be heard.
The article also mentions: “The U.S. Government wants to force bloggers and online grassroots activists to register and regularly report their activities to Congress.”
I haven’t been writing a lot of politics: this is still a fairly mundane account of what goes on in my personal life. It’s so boring some days, I don’t even bother to report. But this distrust of citizens is the sort of thing that will radicalize me. Report my activities? I thought that was in the text of the blog. The intention was to report my activities on the site. Of course, I did just say that I omit a lot.
On to Media Mindlessness: I didn’t catch this one on the Internet, I saw the local news hyping the video. Local news is now completely useless. They get fooled all the time - they’re only good for amusement. Check out Timur Bekmambetov Punks the World With Viral Video from Cinematical. I figured it was something like that. A video surfaces of a guy freaking out in an office, and some junior TV news producer spots it. From there it’s a short hop to millions of viewers. They don’t even bother to authenticate anything - that’s the legacy of so many years of entertainment reporting. If you really think about it, your life isn’t substantially different without it. Not only have people been suckered by marketing, but the news can’t even be trusted anymore. My personal reaction is that I can’t trust anything I hear. Which will probably get me killed some day when the news is both true and important.
If only there were some fable about irresponsible boys giving false alarms until they can’t be believed anymore!
Posted in media-studies, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:03:00 GMT
I remember now why the ideas in “The Economics Of Attention” seem so familiar. I’ve read some of it before in David Shenk’s books “Data Smog” and “The End Of Patience”. I just pulled “The End Of Patience” of my shelf and started re-reading it after about ten years. The chapters are all short pieces that appeared elsewhere, although when he was writing, I wasn’t reading a lot of those online sources.
Shenk sounds a cautious note, and for me it resonates. I’m happy to take and use technology that I think is helpful, but not all of it is. In fact, a lot of it is dangerous in subtle ways. A culture of techno-enthusiasm doesn’t stop to consider what might go wrong - even if it does legitimately devote some resources to studying the problem while it goes.
There was a fashion for the type of writing you might impugn as ‘Neo-Luddite’ for a while there. It probably had a lot to do with the advanced age of the people in publishing. As the younger generations gradually take over, that kind of literature is less in vogue. It turns out that I have read copious amounts of it, and I’m not quite old yet.
Shenk strikes out at Television’s thought suppression. He bemoans the Flash and Java web replacing older textual formats. He blames journalism for shirking its duties in an information-rich environment. There’s a section on Microsoft-bashing (that sure didn’t die off in Internet time!). He also takes aim at computerized toys and their potential to replace education with marketing. It’s a free-for-all in there.
I can’t be sure, but in the years since I first read Shenk’s book, I have probably lost a lot of patience. I am at least as distracted as I ever was - if not more so. I don’t know if I could really appreciate what he was saying ten years ago. A lot of that has to do with what I’ve read since, confirming a lot of his ideas.
Posted in books, media-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:32:00 GMT
A couple of months ago, my sister and I listened to Doug Fine talk about harvesting free grease behind fast food restaurants in New Mexico for his bio-diesel pickup truck. Ever since that day, I’ve been extra sensitive to headlines about this subject. I predicted (kind of a no-brainer) that as gasoline prices went up, the pressure to substitute bio-diesel would cause discarded restaurant grease to become more highly valued. You can actually see this in a Simpson’s episode. Homer is surreptitiously pumping out the grease from the elementary school cafeteria when Groundskeeper Willy discovers the theft. His punchline is something to the effect of “My Retirement Grease!”.
…And whatever happened to the recycling craze? Glass, Cans, Newspaper, etc. used to fetch a price if you trucked them in. That meant you could get free pickup for this variety of trash, because for the trash company, the disposal would pay for itself. The issue here is the phase-change from that situation where you’re just happy to get rid of it to that situation where you will kill to protect your precious resource. Like Willy.
Today I see this headline in Fark:
Old and busted: Stealing copper for resale as scrap. New hotness: Stealing grease for resale as fuel
The article itself is a little more interesting… It’s not ‘thieves’ so much as it is a war among companies. Maybe. The occasional freelancer could float through this story unnoticed. “Slick Florida thieves haul off grease”.
The thing that really interests me requires taking one step back…
Stealth Facts In Predictable Journallism
Fark excels in the witty alternate headline. Which is maybe why the potential for deception in the actual headline is so clear in my mind. There is a pithy way in which either of these headlines can tell me “Read no further - You already know the story”.
But of course, if I didn’t read the story, what would be the point of journalism?
But of course, I don’t usually bother, so journalism IS pointless, yes?
There almost needs to be a truce: I can agree to pay attention as a reader, if the writer can agree not to bury fascinating things in the story that the headline just doesn’t capture. What ever happened to the pyramid style in newspaper articles? I should be able to stop at any point, confident that I am only giving up on a finer layer of detail, not missing some crucial twist. Journalism was always supposed to function as a resource for the time-challenged.
My hope is that facts and ideas can be indexed. Headlines currently serve the semantic role of index. The minutia of life should be no different from scholarly work in this way: There is no telling when any of this information might turn out to be important.
Posted in writing-craft, economics, media-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:16:00 GMT
It can be hard to tell, with the mountain of books I have in my apartment, that there are a few real gems in there that are more important than the others. “Ways Of Seeing” is such a book.
It’s a slim Penguin volume. I was shopping at one of the long gone Olsson’s stores one afternoon, and probably flirting with the manager, when I spotted it. The book is the companion volume to a BBC series from 1972. The essays talk about the status of great works of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and communications technologies (conjuring up Walter Benjamin), the treatment of women as subjects in the era of paintings as wealth and ownership, and the uses of art in publicity (I would say ‘advertising’) to make us insecure enough to buy and fuel the consumer society. So, that’s a lot. For the moment it’s the advertising chapter that interests me the most, but they are all related.
There is a picture in the book of Piccadilly Circus. A current photo looks a bit different, but you still have the Coke, TDK, and Sanyo billboards. I’m used to thinking of Times Square or the Ginza in these terms. I notice that in Washington DC, we don’t have anything like that. Soon maybe Gallery Place - I’ve got the pictures to prove it.
In the background, I have all sorts of thoughts and opinions about independent versus corporate retailers, the destruction of small towns, and the value of local economies.
“Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which ultimately benefits the public (the consumer) and the most efficient manufacturers - and thus the national economy. It is closely related to ideas about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser: freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of ‘The Free World’.”
All right. But I still have one question: If I see Coke for sale in the store, why do I need a neon sign to remind me of its existence? As a consumer, I am still free to make choices without advertising. Today, I am unable to mask my contempt for marketing. Every kind of product is a little different. I could buy a coke every day, but I couldn’t buy stereo equipment or a car that often. Is is really the advertising that creates the free choice of the consumer? Would that free choice really wither away without it? More specifically to the quote: does advertising really benefit the most efficient manufacturer, or just the one willing to spend the most money on advertising?
[…]
Just thinking about the site - the place with the billboards and the neon signs -
Posted in urban-studies, economics, books, media-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:21:00 GMT
